Forgetting a Poem

A few days ago, I received an email from Doods Santos of De La Salle University. For those who know Doods or Dr. Santos (formally to many), she is a Bikol literature scholar always looking for manuscripts and compiling them under titles and rubrics. Poems about Bikol, works about Bikol and the storms, etc. The email last week simply announced that she found a poem of mine from an old compilation.

I recognized the poem as indeed mine. Soon, I was giving her information about the poetry. It was part of the September Poetry Contest sponsored by WE, one of the student organizations allowed during the martial law years in Ateneo de Naga. I also told her that Rudy Alano, one of the judges, did not like the poem very much citing lines weakened by being direct. Why write poetry if prose (with direct lines) could do it. Rudy, however, was "outnumbered" by two other judges. The poem won First Prize. A year after that, I submitted again, poems (poems, this time) to the same competition. Again, one of my entries, Borobarangay: The Song of Matea won.  It did not impress Rudy although he placed it No. 2 in his list. He cited the "convoluted syntax" of the poem even as he stated how the poem recalled for him images of Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. All my three poems won First, Second, and Third Place. From then, I became a fan of Wallace Stevens reciting each morning the lines from the poet (memorizing them, too): Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,/And the green freedom of a cockatoo/Upon a rug mingle to dissipate/The holy hush of ancient sacrifice...

From then on, I learned about how words are by themselves poetry and how when you find the combination of words you open up a universe of ideas. But even when you travel into that space, a part of you remains isolated, deep in privacy of the self, away from a greater society of listeners and readers. I learned, too, how this language, this English language, will really be not my language.

Why forget poetry? Doods was asking me. Maybe because I stopped writing poems in English. You have to publish it, Doods urged me. Here it is, then Doods, that poem. I own this only because I have my name affixed to it. Otherwise, I see a young man whose face I am trying hard to recall. He lived in that world that, to borrow another poet's words, I cannot visit not even in my dreams.

I wrote this when I was 17.

Canticle of the Dying River

The sun is not impotent when it

Drips, down, my mirror round humming

An old, and tale of fireflies, the

Long rosary of birds trails to find

Unglistened itself in a murky cup.

But a mudfish senile laughs his

Worm-peopled gills saying a tireless

Chain of prayers for a virility

Returning and lotuses that plague

And that paddle, the rowers flaunt in

Their rituals the pomp stolen from

The gods of Narra.  While rows of

Women, the Mysteries forgotten, sighing,

Whispering their love that smells

Fetid and sodden by my bank.

Viva la Virgen!

The shouts, the cries forming an

Arrow sharp that must pierce the man

Of the Ferris Wheel.

 

Viva la...The business is losing.

 

The pagoda that must tilt, a knot strong

To tie the faith of an old man. The crown

That must get wet to make true the tears

Of dames old the first Sunday the journey after.

My face is made sacred when she journeys

Back today.  Tomorrow when she is back in

Tomb, pure, golden, with perfume blessed, an

Old man, without prayers and tears, will

Throw his waste into my face unsacred.

And I shall be dying again.